THE BACKLASH, CHAPTER 1 — I'll take it as a compliment that I now warrant a proper Wall Street Journal takedown for crimes of...well, I'm not quite sure what the crimes are. But Lee Gomes has tried mightily to find flaws with the Long Tail theory and deserves a response of some sort.

How large is the long tail? — In his column in the Wall Street Journal today, Lee Gomes tries to debunk Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory, and on his Long Tail blog today, Anderson tries to debunk Gomes's debunking. It's an interesting - and important - debate, and I find myself agreeing with both gentlemen.

Google to offer advertisers click fraud stats — Responding to concerns about click fraud in the online-ad industry, Google will be revealing to advertisers the number of invalid clicks on their ads with changes it's set to make to its AdWords system late Tuesday.

Estimating invalid clicks — Over the past few months, we've provided answers to your invalid click questions. Now, Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, is back to provide details on a new related feature.

IE7 to be distributed via Automatic Updates! — As we get close to the final availability of Internet Explorer 7, I want to provide an update on our distribution plans. To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates …

TiVo Is Watching When You Don't Watch, and It Tattles — AS the advertising and television industries debate how to measure viewers of shows watched on digital video recorders, the pioneering maker of the recorders, TiVo, is getting into the argument. It is starting a research division …

Calacanis — I rarely blog, but I recently saw this post by Jason Calacanis so I thought I'd share my thoughts. — Jason, — Clever PR stunt, but man, in the end I believe it's going to do more damage for Netscape than good. Ya see users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr …

Limelight Raises $130 Million — Limelight, the CDN darling for hot content startups, announced a monster round of $130 million in funding from Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, which we heard was in the works earlier this month. Limelight said it will spend the money on building out it's infrastructure.

Nigeria orders first million OLPC laptops — $100 laptop project receives first official order — Nigeria has officially ordered and paid for one million of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) devices, according to the Nigerian Vanguard newspaper. — The deal is the first actual order …

Sony NW-S205 (2GB) — Overview Series info User Opinions Compare — CNET editor's take — To the lack of surprise of most industry professionals, who generally put more stock in Apple's ability to keep secrets than in Sony's, the Japanese consumer electronics giant fessed up to having a unique …

SayNow helps musicians call their fans — Sometimes simple systems work the best and SayNow might be one of those cases. The service, still in private beta, is targeting musicians on MySpace who want to exchange voice messages with their fans. They can record voice messages …

Congress spanks naughty sex sites — The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill that would make it a federal felony for Webmasters to use innocent words like "Barbie" or "Furby" but actually feature sexual content on their sites. — Anyone who includes misleading "words" …

AlwaysOn: YouTube wants to stay independent — During a panel at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit 2006, YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley was asked by moderator Kara Swisher about disparaging comments Bill Gates made about his service at the D conference. "Speaking about competiton and Gates …